Friday, December 31, 2010

Riley and Moondoggie have a special holiday wish for all Crappers everywhere:

Riley: Enjoy your temporal bacchanalia, bipeds. Your days as the dominant species of this planet are numbered, much like the primitive time-keeping devices with "cute" and "amusing" images of felines which you display on your desks and walls.

As you've probably heard, Sadly, No! is asking its readers to support the wild and crazy Robin of Berkeley for the "Grande Frappacino Conservative Blogress Diva" contest being conducted by Gay Patriot. Of course, Robin is our favorite candidate too, what with her being almost as much fun as a bag of Pastor Swanks.

I have never won anything in my life. So I don’t expect to win this contest. But I do find it flattering to be nominated in the Grande Conservative Blogress Diva contest on Gay Patriot.

[...]

Just in case, I am hard at work on my acceptance speech. Here’s a sneak preview: “I am so grateful for this honor. I’d like to thank my husband, Jon; oh, never mind, he’s wearing a T-Shirt that reads, “I never slept with that woman. . .Robin of Berkeley.”

Well then, I’d like to thank my closest friends; hmm. . ..forget about that. They don’t even know I’m a conservative. And they’d dump me in two seconds flat. My family, then; I’ll thank them: No, they also haven’t a clue.

See, Robin really needs this award to keep herself going, because she has to keep her real self hidden from everyone around her. Her friends and family and those whom she is supposed to trust would certainly reject her if they knew the truth about her, because they are so judgemental and evil and stuff. (I'm sure the psychological profession has a term for this condition, and maybe they'll tell it to Robin if she wins this award.)

Anyway, not only does Robin need this award, she also deserves if to make up for the hell that is her everyday life. Here's a sample from earlier this year:

Monday, Monday:

I am in Whole Foods examining some (non-organic) strawberries. Out of nowhere, a woman charges at me like a mad bull. She launches into an impassioned and very scary tirade about nasty pesticides and poisoned farm workers. I feel lucky to get out of there in one piece (but without strawberries).

Because in Berkeley, health food devotes frequently murder shoppers in grocery stores when they get worked up about pesticides.

Tuesday:

I spend fifty minutes staring at Obama -- well not Barack in the flesh, but his likeness on my young client's t-shirt. Fantasize about closing up shop and hanging up my shingle in Texas. But does anyone in those red states actually need a shrink?

Pity poor Robin, who was forced to stare at a likeness of Obama for 50 minutes while some young liberal jerk babbled on about ... something -- Robin obviously can't be expected to pay attention to his words when he was so inconsiderate as to wear that hateful t-shirt for his appointment. He probably did it on purpose just to annoy Robin -- and to send her the message that the President is out to get her. Too bad everyone in the red states is too sane to need somebody like Robin to fix their psyches.

Wednesday:

Head over to my local holistic pharmacy for some personal hygiene products. After handing over the cash to the cashier, she stares at me blankly. I look at her, she looks at me, I look at her, she looks at me...until finally I break the stalemate.

I utter the five most scandalous words in Berkeley: "May I have a bag?" What I actually want to say is, "Do you expect me to carry my intimate female products on my head like they do in the third world?!" -- but instead, I simply glare. Upon exiting the store, I am certain I hear snickering.

As part of an evil progressive plot to ruin Robin's week, the slack jawed, hippie cashier failed to offer Robin a bag, and so Robin had to ask for one (because the alternate would have been to put her tube of holistic KY jelly in her purse). And asking meant a big victory for the forces of socialism everywhere! Of course, Robin got some of her own back by glaring, but the cashier did possibly snicker, and that is just so unacceptable that nobody would blame Robin for going back with a non-holistic gun and shooting up the store!

Sunday:

The highlight of my week! My sweetie and I hightail it to a magical, foreign land -- the suburbs! After driving thirty minutes, I know that we are heading in the right direction when the car in front of us displays the following bumper sticker: Liberalism is a Mental Disorder. I laugh uproariously while my leftist hubby scowls his disapproval.

It's a whole new world: No one is all up in my business, the streets aren't trashed, and I only see a handful of Obama bumper stickers.

But the pièce de résistance is when I buy shampoo at CVS and the cashier places the product in a bag without even asking. She does so with a warm smile rather than a contemptuous growl! I now know ecstasy!

And if Robin gets such a thrill from a CVS bag, just imagine her reaction to winning that award from the Gay Conservative Blog Guy. So, go forth and vote, if you feel like it. (The contest only runs until Dec. 31st and Robin already commands a substantial majority, but if you don't vote, then you can't complain about not being offered a bag in the holistic drug store.)

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

As you probably know, Scott has risked his life several times in recent months to watch and summarize non-optimum films so that he could help YOU, our favorite person, save precious hours of your life by not having to view these movies. Also, he did it so that we could derive important messages from these films for the upcoming best seller, Best Living Through Bad Movies: Reflections on Family, Faith, Flag, Films, Fun, and Ford Festivas.

I, on the other hand, have been remiss, wasting my time by pointing out life lessons to stupid kittens and morally deficient dogs. ("See, Flossie, the message of The Towering Inferno is that if you chew up the newspaper one more time, you are going to be in BIG TROUBLE!")

Anyway, I told Scott I would try to start on a movie this week, so I have been scouring "Worst Movies of 2010" lists, of which there are many. Of the films cited that I can watch via on-demand, I am leaning towards The Last Airbender (because M. Night is due for a hit!), Charlie St. Cloud (because Zac Efron is dreamy! Plus, a movie about a teen who plays baseball with his dead brother must offer many important lessons for today's family), and The Nutcracker in 3D (because it cost $90 million and it's about the holocaust, so it HAS to be good).

Not surprisingly, it's also been a good year for America. Not because the economy healed -- it didn't. Not because America saw a racial unification -- it didn't. It's been a good year because Americans in 2010 celebrated the same values in real life they celebrated on the big screen: courage, work ethic and hard-charging masculinity. If you want to know what's going on in America, watch the culture rather than the news channels.

Ben's choice for best picture was The King's Speech.

This magnificent movie justifies the medium. The fascinating and important tale of King George VI -- who had to lead a nation rhetorically while fighting a brutal stammer.

I'm sure this was a very good movie, but I have to say that I was surprised at Ben's defination of what constitutes "hard-charging masculinity."

But, in order to find out what's going on in America, I will go back to on-demand and check out something that celebrates real life. Maybe Clash of the Titans or Prince of Persia. You know, something conservative.

OR – gripping mood music would fit nicely here – by a male whose sexual proclivities were unknown, hence presumed to be heterosexual.

While I don't object to Barry's yen for a little Music To Be Gripped By, I wonder what tune would set the proper mood. Unchained Melody? Theme fromA Summer Place? Yakkity Sax?

This is nothing less than the proclamation of a new civil right – the right not to have your body enjoyed erotically against your will.

The Alta Kocker Martin Luther King.

Barry has drawn a line in the sand, using his grotesquely elongated scrotum as a stylus: this far, and no further! Being glimpsed by a possibly gay man at the gym is the moral equivalent of having your skull split open by a rifle butt on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Unfortunately, his timing may not prove the most propitious, as it doesn't appear that the Roberts Court is particularly enthusiastic about the creation of new civil rights.

It's a right we've always had but never had the need to invoke and defend until the government overthrew "don't ask, don't tell."

So are you planning to join the Army's elite 1st Hoveround® Calvary, or what, Barry?

Women, in particular, have always held that right dear

Yes, women have always had to deal with men being jerks. For us, however, this whole taste-of-our-own-medicine thing is new and unexpected, since homosexuality was only recently created by an act of Congress.

We men will keep you ladies safe from us men, so long as we're all in a Bowery Boys movie.

The only thing that's new is the prospect of men and women in the service now openly preferring intimacy with members of their same sex.

I hope nobody tells General von Steuben, or he'll start camping it up all over Valley Forge.

All other arguments against gays serving openly in the military are moral, legal, tactical and practical.

And none of those have worked, so let's try basing public policy on an octogenarian's fear that buff young men might see his schmekel.

This one is highly personal. This one zooms right on by all those earnest questions of "unit cohesion," what course do military chaplains now take whose religions consider homosexuality an abomination

How about a course that leads in the general direction of the 21st Century?

how many dramas might begin with a homosexual of superior rank hitting on a same-sex subordinate and to what deleterious end might those dramas lead, etc.

True, it's much more dramatic when a male superior sexually harasses a male subordinate, rather than, say, when a male sergeant rapes a female recruit at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, because that belongs more in the commedia dell'arte category.

It was dismaying to hear the president spin a heart-warming anecdote about a commanding officer who revealed himself as gay and whose supportive heterosexual troops declared, "We knew he was gay all along, and he's the best commander any of us has ever had." I don't doubt that story's veracity, but I question its typicality.

Don't forget; it was an official of the Nazi German Embassy in Copenhagen who tipped off the Danish Underground that they were about to round up the Jews and deport them to concentration camps. That particular "Nazi" saved 6,000 Jewish lives. Some American civilians paid their own way to the Philippines in 1946 to testify on behalf of a Japanese prison camp commander who was uncharacteristically kind to his prisoners.

I'm simply saying there was a good German here and a good Japanese there. I'm not saying the wartime Germans and Japanese were a good ol' bunch of boys. And, no, dummy; I'm not comparing gays to Nazis or imperial Japanese.

"I'm just saying that good gays are as rare as good Nazis."

And, no, this is not an anti-gay screed. This may be the most pro-gay piece you've read lately.

It's so moist -- even dripping -- with acceptance and love that I'm going to need some Handi-Wipes, or maybe a sponge mop. But why is Barry so pro-gay? Simple: he wants the gays out of the showers and back in the closets not because he's a bigot, or because he finds the mingled scent of unwashed pits and mothballs arousing, but because he knows that continued segregation and discrimination will keep the gays safe. After all, those Alabama state troopers didn't shoot and club Blacks before they started protesting and demanding civil rights, did they? Well, they did, but it was more of a hobby.

I literally fear instances of straight GIs losing it and actually murdering their gay comrades-in-arms. And I feared that long before any present debate or legislation about gays in the military.

In the mid-1990s, I got a call from a listener to my radio talk show who told of serving with five or six other men in close quarters in an Arctic hut in Greenland. One of the men started making subtle and then not-so-subtle homosexual advances. "We put him out," said the caller. "You did WHAT?" I asked. "You heard me," said the caller. "We put him out." "Did he survive?" I asked. "Of course not," said the caller without remorse. "This was the Arctic." A conscientious listener notified the police. This was an open, if anonymous, confession of murder. The FBI asked the network for a tape of that conversation. I heard nothing further about it.

I completely believe this story, because my father-in-law was stationed at Thule Air Force Base in the 1950s, and he mentioned that their unit motto was "You Tease, You Freeze."

Help yourself to an "inconvenient truth." Apparently, gays are not enraged by heterosexual sex practices.

Although they're maybe grossed out a little when we start doing that baby talk thing.

Vice-versa does not obtain. Gay sexual practices can trigger anti-gay rage among some heterosexuals.

Only gays dare comment on gay behavior, so I'll settle for quoting the mantra at a gay San Francisco bathhouse. "Rub-a-dub-dub. Three men in a tub. And that's on a slow night!"

What! Gay men are making jokes about a nursery rhyme we used to make jokes about on the playground? Freeze them! FREEZE THEM!

I recall shower time during basic training at Fort Dix, N.J. It was like watering cattle down before shipping them out of Omaha in boxcars. At least a dozen shower nozzles and a hundred naked men screaming, cussing, carrying on and even washing. I remember thinking, "I would rather take a shower like this with a hundred gay men who I didn't know were gay than with 99 straight men and one known homosexual."

That's so funny, because I recall when I was in elementary school, I remember thinking, "I hope Ronald Reagan is elected President some day so he can eliminate the Fairness Doctrine, and then somebody can invent right wing talk radio so eventually Barry Farber can be retire from it, and then after someone else invents the Internet, he can write a piece telling us how his thinking on homosexuality hasn't advanced one millimeter since 1948."

Go ahead and laugh, denounce, demean, berate, snarl, spit and threaten. I remain the world's foremost authority on whom I'd like to take a shower with.

While I remain the world's best source of information on when to avoid the shower room at the gym because there's an old guy in there with a ball sack like the pendulum on a grandfather clock.

Sunday, December 26, 2010

For those folks who may find the holiday season inspiring a reassessment of their life and faith, I bring tidings of great joy. WO'C Spiritual Advisor J. Grant Swank, as you may have noticed, has been writing less about politics these days, but only because he's busy getting back to his core competency of spreading the Gospels like mayonnaise on white bread.

Pastor Swank points out that faith is a journey, much like the traditional Muslim Hajj expedition undertaken by the Three Magi, Zoroastrian astrologers who traveled all the way from Persia to Judea because they were guided by a star, and because their weak negotiating skills allowed Priceline to really screw them. However...

[I]n this faith traveling, there are numerous Herods who would stand in the way, attempting to wreck the faith project. They are bloodthirsty, agents of hell, mean to the pits.

I knew a guy who was mean to the sternum once, and that was bad enough; but if you're mean all the way up to your pits, then you should seriously consider getting help. Just not from Robin of Berkeley.

Such should never surprise the faith child. Jesus promised as much. That is why He told His own to be as wise as snakes and harmless as doves. Wise as snakes!

Harmless as doves! Your turn, Pastor. (I assume this is the ecclesiastical version of that "Tastes Great! Less Filling!" debate.)

How interesting that every time heaven breaks through with some marvelous holy extravaganza of love and mercy, hell gets as angry as angry can be. So it is that while God implanted Himself into human history, Herod became furious with envy. He stalked. He balked.

He caulked. But he had to, because his winter palace, Herodium, was poorly insulated, and as extravagant as Herod was, he wasn't trying to heat the whole West Bank

He strung out his nerves to dry.

This is a bit off-topic, but did you know sun-dried nerves are a cannibal delicacy? When I lived in New York I often saw savages with a taste for human flesh paying up to $17.99 a pound for the stuff at Balducci's.

In our faith journeys we come upon the outrageous counterfeits. How they wear their masks tightly.

Has this ever happened to you? You're walking along, minding your own business, when you suddenly stumble over a counterfeit who obviously smothered to death in his tight-fitting Nixon mask or overly-snug leather bondage hood, and think to yourself, "Not so outrageous now, are you?"

Again, Jesus warns His genuine grace children to be wary of the snakes.

The Apostle Arch Hall, Sr. spreads the Good News and Reptile Advisory.

How sad that the chief priests and teachers of the law could inform Herod of the prophetic piece and yet be so utterly far from its personal truth. It would be these very religious play actors who would some day plot the murder of the infant-grown-adult.

While it's true that most victims of murder plots are infant-grown-adults, there is one known case of chief priests and teachers planning the death an adult-grown-infant: 1982, when members of the Sanhedrin conspired to murder the Jonathan Winters character on Mork and Mindy.

Eventually the magi reached Bethlehem. The Jewish shepherds had preceded them in the cave stall.

The magi were grateful there was a cave stall, because Melchior had a shy bladder.

The Christmas account then happily relates that the magi's hearts were overjoyed with their sight discovery. Their faith had led them to the visible God in the cow's trough. There he was, for certain!

You never really appreciate the majesty of a Bible story until you hear Pastor Swank tell it.

But they did not renege. They remained true to the close. Their faith yielded its own reward--sight!

And so it is with each of us--we make the journey to the close, then we see. We come upon heaven's own reward--sight!

And Pastor Swank wrote a thoughtful, incisive piece without a single flummoxing grammatical deformity--psyche!

It was then with such utter ecstasy that these grown men bent their knees before the child. They flung their gold, frankincense, and myrrh--gushing forth with praise and worship. They were beside themselves, no doubt tears streaming down their cheeks. The hot sands were behind them. The babe was before them.

They realized they'd wandered onto the set of Baywatch.

We find out that as we make the faith journey, there are days when we wonder what is going on.

This is beginning to feel like one of those days...

If the magi had turned back somewhere along the westward trail, Jesus would still have been waiting in the Bethlehem cow stall. But they would have missed Him--totally.

Then they would've had to come up with some lame excuse about how they'd gotten a migraine, or had to pick their aunt up at the airport.

Thank heaven the magi remained constant and so came upon The Constant. No wonder their hearts were pounding for joy abounding!

I didn't realize cow troughs could induce tachycardia and excessive rhyming. Someone should put a trigger warning on the cave stall.

Friday, December 24, 2010

To hell with hackers! We have a time-honored holiday tradition around here, and damn it, we're going to honor it. So allow us to present the Wo'C annual crappy Christmas movie:

Babes in Toyland (1986)

Directed by Clive Donner

Written by Paul Zindel

Don’t get your hopes up. This is not the 1934 Laurel and Hardy version. It’s not even the 1961 Annette Funicello–Ray Bolger remake. In fact, it doesn’t even use the Victor Herbert score, replacing the classic show tunes with music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse (who was also responsible for the songs – such as “Patch! Natch!” – in 1985’s Santa Claus, so nobody can claim he wasn’t on a streak, although you could technically have said the same thing about Charles Starkweather).

It’s snowing hard in the little town of Backlot, U.S.A. Eleven year old Drew Barrymore is reading her mama's cookbook, wearing her apron, and – judging by her jaundiced face and sunken eyes – using her grandfather John Barrymore’s liver.

Drew is a no nonsense little girl who has put away childish things. She has no use for toys, spending all her time cooking, cleaning, looking after her older sister Mary, and plotting to assassinate their mother and assume her identity. But while Mom is out, probably buying a gun, a howling blizzard blows over the TV antenna and knocks down the telephone lines, leaving Drew trapped, isolated, and unable to call for help, and raising our hopes that Ghostface from Scream will get to her before she starts singing. Instead, she dons her jacket and runs out into the freezing cornstarch.

Cut to a toy store, where clerk Keanu Reeves is hitting on Drew’s sister Mary by brandishing a swan-shaped hemorrhoid cushion. But before he can deploy it as a sex toy, Drew bursts into the store to inform Mary that the power is out, a blizzard is about to hit town, and she should hurry home where it’s safe, dark, and frigid. Then night manager Richard Mulligan sexually harasses Mary while Drew squats under the checkout stand. But the two sisters are so full of the Christmas spirit that they immediately forget about the near molestation and pile into Keanu’s jeep so he can drive them around in a blinding snowstorm while everyone sings a song about how to spell Cincinnati.

Keanu swerves suddenly and Drew flies out the back of the vehicle, slides down a hill, and crashes into a pine tree. She dies instantly, or has a low budget, Made for TV out-of-body experience, because a moment later she’s floating in the clouds, above a pastel colored planned community occupied by bored extras in hoop skirts and minor league ball club mascots.

Whee...

Drew crash lands in a giant wedding cake while a man in a pig mask and a humanoid frog in a bonnet gaze at her with their pitiless black eyes. (In Drew's defense, I think we’ve all had that dream.)

Keanu’s Fat Comic Relief Friend™ from the store walks up to Drew wearing tight pants with a double-breasted flap in the groin, and offers her a cookie. Shortly after this scene was shot, creative differences erupted, and original director Roman Polanski walked off the film.

Comic Relief Friend also tempts Drew with some exposition: It seems Toyland and it’s creepy, Wind in the Willows knock-off inhabitants are ruled by Richard Mulligan, who is “so evil, and so bizarre,” that he’s forcing Mary Contrary to marry him (in this version of the tale Mary is still a teenager, so she’s not Quite Contrary yet, just mildly argumentative). But Mary is in love with poor but honest Keanu. Basically, it’s the same plot as The Princess Bride, but with less fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love and miracles, and more of those costumes people wear when they stand on street corners spinning signs for discount electronics stores.

Mary and Keanu can’t elope because Toyland is surrounded by the Forest of the Night, which isn’t as dangerous as the Fire Swamp – no fire spurts, lightning sands, or Rodents of Unusual Size – but the trees constantly sing “Music of the Night” from Phantom of the Opera, so it’s no picnic.

Richard shows up for the non-consensual nuptials sporting a witch’s costume repurposed from the Knott’s Berry Farm Halloween Spooktacular Show, attended by his two henchmen, Max Shreck and Riff Raff. His third minion, Copyright Infringement Lawyer, was unable to attend.

Sadly, the minister doesn’t say “Mawwige,” but he does read a message from the “Toy Master” about true love. But when he starts to pronounce them man and wife, Drew fails to hold her peace, and suddenly, the wedding is off! Comic Relief sings a song about how Drew is “the girl of the week,” while Richard storms into his bowling ball-shaped house, which is filled with sphagnum moss and Sleestaks, and consults with his chief-of-staff, a cycloptic hobo penguin.

It seems Keanu is the rightful manager of the Toyland Cookie Factory, but after his father’s death, his uncle –Richard! –- usurped his position, allowing Keanu to ruin Hamlet years before he got around to stinking up Much Ado About Nothing.

Cut to the Cookie Factor, where Comic Relief is the Official Taster and apparently loves his job, because he bites into a snickerdoodle and has a shivering, violent orgasm that nearly causes his pants flap to pop like a ruptured boiler.

Richard frames his nephew for cookie theft, and Keanu is carted away in the riot wagon (a Disneyland parking lot tram) and thrown in the Pastel Pink Hole of Calcutta.

Things look grim for our hero (is he our hero? And if so, is there some sort of appeals process?), except they break him out of jail in the very next scene. Drew bores the magistrate by talking about Cincinnati, while Mary and Comic Relief unlock the cell door. Keanu is grateful, kissing Mary and telling CR that he’s fat. Meanwhile, Drew locks the magistrate in a cell, and since he’s the only one on duty at the jail, we presume that he will slowly waste away until he resembles the Forgotten Prisoner of Castle Mare from those old Aurora model kits.

They go to see the Toymaster, Mr. Miyagi, who is employed as a sub-contractor by Santa to make all the toys for all the children in the world after underbidding the Elves. But the toys are actually made by Mr. Miyagi’s laborers, who look like Amish Whos, and you get what you pay for, because the Whomish can’t even paint eyes on a doll, instead cranking out a succession of deathly pale, pupil-less playthings that resemble the eponymous characters from Tombs of the Blind Dead. Merry Christmas!

Mr. Miyagi shows Drew, Mary, and Keanu a cabinet full of life-size, cobwebbed wooden soldiers which he will presumably imbue with unholy life at some point before the last commercial break. He also tells the kids that he’s been siphoning the world’s supply of evil, distilling it down to its essence, and storing it in an old Chianti bottle, which he hopes no one breaks. Basically, it’s the ancient Greek creation myth, except Pandora has been replaced by Ernest and Julio Gallo.

Keanu and Mary get themselves captured and imprisoned in Richard’s bowling ball. Drew and CR go to Mr. Miyagi to complain about it, but are interrupted when Richard and his knock-off minions stage a home invasion. They perform some Japanese-style jump rope bondage on Drew, then Richard steals the bottle of Evil Rosé, and leaves her to be molested by the Hobo Penguin Cyclops. It flaps and squawks and humps her, but she manages to slip free somehow and untie the others, and then they blind the thing just as Ulysses and his men did to Polyphemus. Merry Christmas, kids!

Drew and Comic Relief grab a couple of pink baseball bats and march into the forest to bust some heads. But they fall down a hole and into what looks like Sid and Marty Krofft’s lower G.I. tract, where they find Keanu and Mary. Richard is waving his bottle and going on about how he’s going to conquer Toyland with “evil vapors.” So basically, his plans for world domination could be foiled with a bathroom fan.

“He’s got trolls,” Keanu drones. “Hundreds of evil trolls!” We cut to Richard’s army, and…Well, he’s got two members of the Screen Extras Guild in repurposed Sleestak suits. But Richard uncorks the bottle, and tells them that the green vapor will turn them all into trolls. Unfortunately, that would require special effects, or at least a costume change, so Drew tells them all to fight it with the power of municipal nomenclature, and they sing about how to spell Cincinnati again, which makes them immune to chemical warfare.

Our heroes run for it, twisting and turning through the dark tunnels, pursued by Richard, although the whole thing feels less like a chase scene and more like a colonoscopy. But despite their evasive maneuvers, Richard manages to track them by sniffing Drew’s pheromone trail, which reeks of sugar and spice.

They make it to Toyland, as though anyone cares, but Richard is right behind them, snarling, “I’ll kick the giggles out of their heart!” They hop into some pastel go-carts and stage a car chase that makes Driving Miss Daisy look like Buillit. It goes on for awhile, with the cast driving in lazy circles while Richard shouts, “The little one – I want her! I want the little one!” until it seems like NAMBLA went co-ed and celebrated with a trip to the Disneyland Autopia.

Drew, Keanu, and Mary run to Mr. Miyagi for help, but since Drew doesn’t believe in toys, they’re screwed. He reveals that the only way to defeat Richard and his army of Land of the Lost leftovers is for Drew to “believe in Toyland, and all it stands for.” Mostly pig masks and pedophilia,

Then Mr. Miyagi lip syncs a song about some pointless crap while trying to touch her with a disturbing clown puppet. Drew declares, “I want to believe! I guess life just made me grow up too fast!” Well, life and booze and drugs and cigarettes, but luckily for Toyland, the ontology of toys is the answer to sex- and narcotic-fueled precociousness!

So she’s all set for the lingerie party in the Sleestak Grotto after the film wraps. Cool.

As expected, Drew’s innocent, child-like faith brings the toy soldiers to a grim, shambling mockery of life, and we anxiously await a Battle Royale of badly fabricated costumes.

Meanwhile, the pork-faced furries who inhabit the town build a barricade to hold off the monsters in a scene that’s highly evocative of Les Misérables, except the ticket prices are more reasonable. Richard’s troops wander toward the camera, but in a twist that will likely be familiar to any 19th Century Zulu, the mechanical Toy Soldiers show up with rifles and artillery, and suddenly Toyland is less FAO Schwartz and more Kent State. The soulless automatons open fire indiscriminately, proving that the Three Laws of Robotics don’t protect Sleestaks, then we cut to the wedding of Mary and Keanu.

The children’s choir accompanying the ceremony promise “the happiest marriage that anyone ever knew.” Of course, back in Cincinnati, the wedding of their real life counterparts will be more of a shotgun affair when Keanu knocks up 17-year old Mary, and she winds up working two jobs after he rolls his Jeep, fractures his pelvis and becomes addicted to Percocet.

But wait! Who’s that showing up just before the end credits to justify calling this mess a Christmas movie? Why, it’s Santa Claus, in his magical sleigh pulled by a team of six reindeer cut-outs made from unfinished plywood! Except Santa is actually Mr. Miyagi, which I imagine will absolutely thrill those friends of Haley Barbour who are torqued off that black guy from The Wire playing a Norse god in Thor.

Drew hops aboard for the trip back to Cincinnati.

“I think we’ll take the Milky Way,” Mr. Miyagi says. “All the way.” Get it, Drew? “Hang on child,” he advises. “And look out for the shooting star!”

I’m sure he meant all that in the nicest way possible, and the "shooting star" he's warning her about isn't actually a pet name for a body part, but after an hour and 35 minutes of this film, everything sounds dirty.

Back in the real world, we see that Keanu and Mary didn’t take Drew to the Emergency Room after her near-fatal collision with the tree, but just hauled her home and dumped her unconscious ass on the damp, stained sofa. Because the best treatment for a subarachnoid hemorrhage is mildew.

Drew wakes up and does the whole Wizard of Oz and-you-were-there-and-you-where-there bit, while somewhere overhead, Santa Miyagi’s sleigh and his six motionless, two-dimensional reindeer fly jerkily across the moon as he cries out, “A low budget Christmas to all! And to all – a cheap night!”

Thanks to a particularly vicious hacker, our previous home is a spectacular, unusable mess at the moment. So until further notice, we'll be squatting here -- please do us a favor and pass the word to any other Crappers you may know.

On the bright side (or is it?) our Annual Christmas Movie Massacre will posted later this evening.